Programs Won't Launch in Win7 64-bit

UPDATE (10/7/11): I never did find an actual solution for this problem. Every time I thought I had something, it would always come back. In the end, I had to reinstall the system. :/

So, I've been running into an issue on my Lenovo Thinkpad X120e when booted into Windows 7 where programs won't launch from the taskbar when I click on them. The little transparent box shows up around it, it sits for a second, then fades away.

I found, however, that I could run things from the command line, though that was not a good fix. After futzing around with the startup applications in msconfig, I found that it would start programs just fine if I turned off all of my startup items. This was also suboptimal, so I set to tracking down the culprit from the startup items by enabling them one-by-one and restarting each time.

UPDATE (6/5/11): Turns out my below "fix" may have just been coincidental, because my issue returned. It hung around through several reboots until I ran Windows Update and updated my video card driver, after which it went away again. Whether this fixes things permanently, we'll have to see.

I'll update this post if anything changes.

Original, ineffectual post:

Eventually, I found the problem to be related to the Sidebar application, which powers the CPU frequency and weather widgets I like to have sitting on my desktop. :(

I haven't had any problems since I turned it off.